Top 35 Johann Georg Hamann Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The farther reason looks the greater is the haze in which it loses itself.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

2. “Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race, as the garden is older than the ploughed field; painting, than writing; song, than declamation; parables, than logical deduction; barter, than commerce. A deeper sleep was the repose of our most distant ancestors, and their movement was a frenzied dance. Seven days they would sit in the silence of thought or wonder; – and would open their mouths – to winged sentences.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

3. “A writer who is in a hurry to be understood today or tomorrow runs the danger of being misunderstood the day after tomorrow.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

4. “Lies, fables and romances must needs be probable, but not the truth and foundation of our faith.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

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5. “When I rest my feet my mind also ceases to function.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

6. “A thirsty ambition for truth and virtue, and a frenzy to conquer all lies and vices which are not recognized as such nor desire to be; herein consists the heroic spirit of the philosopher.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

7. “Few authors understand themselves, and a proper reader must not only understand his author but also be able to see beyond him.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

8. “What for others is style, for me is soul.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

9. “What Tarquin the Proud said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

10. “I look upon logical proofs the way a well-bred girl looks upon a love letter.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

11. “Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

12. “Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

13. “Thus the public use of reason and freedom is nothing but a dessert, a sumptuous dessert.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

14. “Physics is nothing but the ABC’s. Nature is an equation with an unknown, a Hebrew word which is written only with consonants to which reason has to add the dots.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

15. “The philosophers have always given truth a bill of divorce, by separating what nature has joined together and vice versa.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

16. “Without language we would have no reason, without reason no religion, and without these three essential aspects of our nature, neither mind nor bond of society.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

17. “Self knowledge begins with the neighbor, the mirror, and just the same with true self-love; that goes from the mirror to the matter.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

18. “Every phenomenon of nature was a word, – the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

19. “Faith is not the work of reason, and therefore cannot succumb to its attack, because faith arises just as little from reason as tasting and seeing do.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

20. “The thirst for vengeance was the beautiful nature which Homer imitated.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

21. “Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

22. “If sensibility and understanding as the two branches of human knowledge spring from one common root, to what end such a violent, unauthorized and willful separation of that which nature has joined together! Will not both branches wither away and die through a dichotomy and division of their common root?”

— Johann Georg Hamann

23. “What one believes does not, therefore, have to be proved, and a proposition can be ever so incontrovertibly proven without on that account being believed.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

24. “The weakness of ourselves and of our reason makes us see flaws in beauties by making us consider everything piece by piece.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

25. “Do nothing or everything; the mediocre, the moderate, is repellent to me; I prefer an extreme.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

26. “If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

27. “All human wisdom works and has worries and grief as reward.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

28. “Everything the human being heard from the beginning, saw with its eyes, looked upon and touched with its hands was a living word; for God was the word.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

29. “Our reason arises, at the very least, from this twofold lesson of sensuous revelations and human testimonies.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

30. “Indeed, if a chief question does remain: how is the power to think possible? – The power to think right and left, before and without, with and above experience? then it does not take a deduction to prove the genealogical priority of language.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

31. “What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave’s smock at home?”

— Johann Georg Hamann

32. “The product of paper and printed ink, that we commonly call the book, is one of the great visible mediators between spirit and time, and, reflecting zeitgeist, lasts as long as ore and stone.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

33. “Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

34. “Everything that man in the beginning heard, saw with his eyes, contemplated, and felt with his hands, was a living word. For God was the Word. With this Word in his mouth and in his heart, the origin of language was as natural, as near and easy, as child’s play.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

35. “The most miraculous researchers into language are also, from time to time, the most impotent exegetes; – the strongest lawgivers are the destroyers of their tables, or they will become one-eyed through the fault of their children.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

36. “The purity of a language dispossesses it of its wealth; a correctness that is all too rigid takes away its strengh and manhood. In a city as big as Paris, forty learned men are procured each year, at no expense, who infalliably know what is pure and polite in their mother tongue and what is neccessary for the monopoly of this junkshop.”

— Johann Georg Hamann

37. “From the orators were made talkers; from historians, polyhistors; from philosophers, sophists; from poets, wits.”

— Johann Georg Hamann